SERVING CRAZY WITH CURRY

Transcontinental family saga about a young Indian immigrant to California who slowly rebuilds her life after a failed suicide attempt.

Poor Devi has come to the conclusion that she’s a failure: an unendurable thought for the daughter of overachievers. Born in India to a socially prominent family, Devi came to America as a girl when her father, Avi, founded a technology firm that prospered and grew into one of the earliest successes of Silicon Valley. Devi’s sister Shobha is the vice president of an engineering firm, and Shobha’s husband, Girish, is a professor at Stanford. Devi’s mother, Saroj, is a traditional Indian wife and mother, but even she grew up in an atmosphere of success as the daughter of an Indian Army brigadier. So the expectations for Devi are pretty high—which makes good odds for failure, statistically speaking. And she flunks the test with flying colors. To begin with, she is unmarried and has just ended an affair with a married man. Second, she has lost her job in the midst of the NASDAQ crash of the late 1990s. Plus, she has lost a baby that no one knows about. So Devi slits her wrists one morning in her bathtub and settles back to let nature take its course. Fortunately for her, however, her pushy mother likes to drop in unannounced and arrives for a visit in time to call an ambulance. After a close call like that, Devi is returned to her parents’ for observation and recovery. Saroj broods over her daughter and begins for the first time to question her own fate as well: an introspection that leads to some unusual developments, as does the revelation of Devi’s miscarriage. Things were so much easier back in India.

A portrait of expatriate nostalgia, shaded heavily with immigrant identity angst and generational conflict, by a leading multicultural voice (The Mango Season, 2003, etc.).